Afghan official wants vote results tossed out

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's deputy attorney general on Saturday urged the country's highest court to throw out the contested results of recent legislative elections, a move that could hobble the new parliament and increase tensions between President Hamid Karzai and his international allies.

Karzai supporters lost seats in the election, and in recent days, the attorney general, a Karzai ally, had challenged the results and arrested several elections officials. But international leaders privately have warned Karzai not to tamper with the results, which Afghan elections officials announced last week, despite widespread evidence of fraud.

Those warnings, however, appeared to have had little effect as Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari declared that the nationwide results were so riddled with fraud that they should be thrown out.

Nazari urged the Supreme Court to order a recount and suggested that high-level elections officials had been intimately involved in trying to rig the election.

Help us deliver journalism that makes a difference in our community.

Our journalism takes a lot of time, effort, and hard work to produce. If you read and enjoy our journalism, please consider subscribing today.

The country's Electoral Complaints Commission questioned the right of both the attorney general and Supreme Court to change the results.

"Once the results are confirmed according to the law, no other organization has the right to question the result of the elections," said Ahmad Zai Rafat, a spokesman for the electoral commission.

International observers said the legal push could delay opening of the parliament and pit competing political factions against each other in the courts.

"We have all these different institutions that are sort of making the rules up as they go along," said Martine van Bijlert, co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a private Kabul-based think tank. "There's no clear authority, no clear hierarchy, and it's not clear who can order who around."

Afghanistan's most recent elections were meant to showcase political progress to bolster U.S. claims that its efforts were making progress in preventing the country from descending into a sanctuary for anti-Western militants.

Instead, the September vote exposed deep-rooted political corruption and brought simmering ethnic tensions to the forefront.

"Up until now, the Supreme Court has done what Karzai has asked them to do, so the big question is: How far does Karzai want to push this?" said van Bijlert. "And I don't think he's made up his mind."

In another development, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. military is ending ties with an Afghan security firm, run by relatives of Karzai, that has been accused of bribing both government officials and Taliban commanders, according to documents obtained by the AP on Thursday.

The AP said the move follows a congressional report in June that said the Watan Group bribed Afghan officials to get exclusive control over a key NATO supply route in southern Afghanistan and paid Taliban commanders to avoid attacks along the highway.